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SALINA,
KS—Local man Scott Gentries told reporters Wednesday that his
deliberately limited grasp of Islamic history and culture was still
more than sufficient to shape his views of the entire Muslim world.

Gentries, 48, said he had absolutely no interest in exposing himself
to further knowledge of Islamic civilization or putting his sweeping
opinions into a broader context of any kind, and confirmed he was
"perfectly happy" to make a handful of emotionally charged words the
basis of his mistrust toward all members of the world’s second-largest
religion.

"I learned all that really matters about the Muslim faith on 9/11,"
Gentries said in reference to the terrorist attacks on the United
States undertaken by 19 of Islam’s approximately 1.6 billion
practitioners. "What more do I need to know to stigmatize Muslims
everywhere as inherently violent radicals?"

"And now they want to build a mosque at Ground Zero," continued
Gentries, eliminating any distinction between the 9/11 hijackers and
Muslims in general. "No, I won’t examine the accuracy of that
statement, but yes, I will allow myself to be outraged by it and use it
as evidence of these people’s universal callousness toward Americans
who lost loved ones when the Twin Towers fell."

"Even though I am not one of those people," he added.

When told that the proposed "Ground Zero mosque" is actually a
community center two blocks north of the site that would include, in
addition to a public prayer space, a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant,
and athletic facilities, Gentries shook his head and said, "I know all
I’m going to let myself know."

Gentries explained that it "didn’t take long" to find out as much
about the tenets of Islam as he needed to. He said he knew Muslims
stoned their women for committing adultery, trained for terrorist
attacks at fundamentalist madrassas, and believed in jihad, which
Gentries described as the thing they used to justify killing infidels.

"All Muslims are at war with America, and I will resist any attempt
to challenge that assertion with potentially illuminating facts," said
Gentries, who threatened to leave the room if presented with the number
of Muslims who live peacefully in the United States, serve in the
country’s armed forces, or were victims themselves of the 9/11 attacks.
"Period."

"If you don’t believe me, wait until they put your wife in a burka,"
Gentries continued in reference to the face-and-body-covering worn by a
small minority of Muslim women and banned in the universities of
Turkey, Tunisia, and Syria. "Or worse, a rape camp. That’s right: For
reasons I am content being totally unable to articulate, I am choosing
to associate Muslims with rape camps."

Over the past decade, Gentries said he has taken pains to avoid
personal interactions or media that might have the potential to
compromise his point of view. He told reporters that the closest he had
come to confronting a contrary standpoint was tuning in to the first
few seconds of an interview with a moderate Muslim cleric before
hastily turning off the television.

"I almost gave in and listened to that guy defend Islam with words I
didn’t want to hear," Gentries said. "But then I remembered how much
easier it is to live in a world of black-and-white in which I can
assign the label of ‘other’ to someone and use him as a vessel for all
my fears and insecurities."